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I would think the lettuce classification is not the only hard part. Having worked on fruit sorting machines where each fruit is rotated under a vision system a
by keithnz 7y ago
I would think the lettuce classification is not the only hard part.
Having worked on fruit sorting machines where each fruit is rotated under a vision system and various measurements and classification are made, in a completely controlled lighting environment.... it's not trivial, especially getting it to the level of commercial viability. Making the robotic cutting mechanism / vision / control system would also be challenging.
- taneq 7y agoThe real killer is reliability, not so much in terms of percentage of produce spoiled but in terms of how often it gums itself up and needs manual intervention. And in a production environment, the numbers add up really quickly and you need a lot of nines. A human doing the job takes 2 seconds per lettuce and can probably work a full 12-hour shift without intervention. Adding some leeway for pauses and breaks, call it 10 hours of uninterrupted production, that's 18,000 lettuces. If your failure rate is only 0.005% that's still one failure per robot per day.
- keithnz 7y agoexactly. In large fruit packing lines if the plant came to a stop, it would cost a lot of $s per minute of downtime (some lines involved 100s of people, incoming trucks, out going trucks etc that all get frozen). Some crops are very time sensitive and delays in the whole supply chain are problematic. Though the good thing with free form robots like that is you can buy a certain amount of redundancy. Some problems though are disastrous, like if the robot starts automatically destroying the lettuces for some reason (unforeseen mechanical failure which is undetected). I have watched this happen a number of times with the automated machines I worked on..... nothing quite like debugging problems with that kind of pressure :)